Welcome to this weekly letter of mine. I might tweak the format, play with headers, investigate better platforms. Who knows? The point is to share and swap better words more directly with folks -- no algorithms gumming up the distances between us.
So much feels up in the air right now. I'm just trying to settle in to something that feels steady, even if it's just an email sent every week at roughly the same hour. How's that for setting some kind of low expectation?
Around here we've been playing a game called Expectations Limbo. How low can you go?
The goal is not to settle for less. The goal is to keep our heads clear and our hearts filled. The goal is to find capacity to help our neighbors get fed and treated with dignity. The goal is to set fewer, better goals.
Today I'm sharing an essay I wrote after reading some good but fleeting news from the realm of urban-dwelling birds. Each week I'll share something new -- an essay, a reflection, a poem, a song. At the end of each letter I'll also share the books, music, movies, and other good things that I've been sipping on. And we'll see what else comes up along the way. Thanks for reading and sharing.
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Birdsong Recaptured
Now that autumn has arrived, you sleep with your bedroom windows open. You miss the calm and unexpected silence of the spring. Autumn has arrived and the outside noise has returned: doors slamming, car alarms going off, motorcycles blaring down Main Street, airplanes and helicopters buzzing overhead. Between the noises outside and the cacophony of voices within -- demanding your vote or attention or protest or purchase -- you fight hard to fully own your own focus.
You take a deep breath, grab a book, remember how to put one word in front of the other. But two sentences into the book you read the word “bird” and immediately flip back into earlier in the morning, in front of the screen, something you read almost in passing—almost, but you don’t pass. You pause long enough to see a picture of a white-crowned sparrow. You pause long enough to read the headline, “When pandemic silenced cities, birdsong recaptured its former glory.”
You read about the white-crowned sparrows that live in San Francisco Bay and build nests along the edges of the water, near the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. The traffic along the bridge creates a constant loud hum and boom and ruckus that become a wall of sound, a blaring backdrop for birdsong. Then in the middle of March, almost overnight, traffic and its sounds disappeared, and the sudden silence changed everything. The sparrow could hear himself more clearly. No people on the road, no trucks with heavy loads, no more motorcycles or stereos or screams filling the air with noise. So the white-crowned sparrow flexed his throat, remembered old ways of opening himself, discovered he could still make sounds so rich and complex that the scientists would say they have not heard such gently nimble and boldly beautiful bird sounds in this part of the country in over half a century.
You keep reading. You read in order to learn about birdsong. You read in order to recapture that sense of your own city’s silence in the spring, or perhaps to recapture something of yourself, or perhaps to be recaptured, captivated by something outside of your own self that you somehow belong to, something more gently nimble than these harsh sounds that surround you now.
When everything was loud, male sparrows would often trespass into one another’s territory, partly because they could not hear each other’s warnings, partly because the tone of their warnings was at such high pitch that it increased the level of aggression, and in this way it became more common for these birds to squawk and scream and resort to violence.
When everything went soft overnight, for a while the male birds did, too. They could sing softly and yet still hear and understand one another across a distance. They could grow soft enough that their songs were what scientists called “glorious,” although such human words pale in comparison to what is said in birdsong, pale in comparison to what he might sing and send traveling along the waves of the air and into her ear, striking a note that perhaps only she can hear, a note that draws her near, so near that when he opens up his beak again, not another sound can come out, and all that remains is intimacy.
Many humans might agree that this spring was awful. As for you, you are not sure it was entirely awful, but certainly it was awfully strange, how everything seemed to change so suddenly, both in ways that you feared were forever, and in ways that you feared might not last. Then slowly the traffic came back, as if it didn’t have a choice. It is loud again, if not louder. You fight hard to fully own your own focus.
You keep your eye upon that sparrow. You keep an ear open to hear his song. You might feel joy, you might feel sorrow, you might rage at all that is beyond your power to change. And also, you may. You may sing your way back into a better silence, then sing your way back toward the noisy earth. You may blow a kiss to the world with your voice, and the kiss may be caught, recaptured, rebirthed.
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What I'm reading: Lia Purpura's All the Fierce Tethers, Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget
What I'm re-reading: G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday
What I'm listening to: Natalie Hemby's Puxico
What I'm listening again: Cat Stevens' Tea For The Tillerman
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Thanks for again opening this first letter. See you next week.
Peace and
Andrew